Ernest Hemingway's Final Hours: ECT, the FBI, and the Morning in Ketchum

Jun 19, 2022
6 min read

Split image of Ernest Hemingway portraits, one shirtless with a gun, overlaid with title text about his final hours in Ketchum.

Ernest Hemingway had survived a great deal by the time the end came. He'd been wounded by mortar fire in World War One, suffered severe injuries in two separate plane crashes in Africa within two days of each other in 1954, had hepatitis, skin cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, and had watched his father shoot himself. He was not a man who buckled easily. What finally wore him down wasn't anything as dramatic as a battlefield. It was a combination of a degenerative physical condition, a medical treatment that destroyed his ability to write, and a conviction that the FBI was watching his every move, which everyone around him dismissed as paranoia, and which turned out to be entirely true.

Newspaper headline: "HEMINGWAY SHOOTS SELF", "Killed Cleaning Gun, Wife Believes".

A Body Breaking Down

By the late 1950s Hemingway's health had been deteriorating for years. He was drinking heavily, his blood pressure was dangerously high, and he'd been suffering from hemochromatosis, a hereditary condition in which the body absorbs and stores too much iron. The excess iron accumulates in organs, damaging the liver, pancreas, heart, and brain. It's manageable if caught early. In Hemingway's case it wasn't caught early, and by the time it was properly understood, it had already been doing damage for years. The condition affects mood, memory, and cognitive function, and was almost certainly a significant factor in the depression and confusion of his final years, though it went largely undiagnosed during his lifetime.

He was also struggling creatively in a way that terrified him. He'd spent years working on what would become A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, and on a long piece about bullfighting that would be published posthumously as The Dangerous Summer. Neither felt right to him. The sentence-level precision that had defined his work seemed to be slipping. Writing, the thing that had been the organising principle of his entire adult life, was becoming harder to access.

Shirtless Ernest Hemingway fiercely holds a shotgun in a tiled room.

The Crook Factory and the FBI File

During World War Two, while living at his estate Finca Vigia outside Havana, Hemingway had set up a private counterintelligence operation with the blessing of the US ambassador to Cuba, Spruille Braden. He called it the Crook Factory. The operation, staffed mainly by Hemingway's Cuban contacts and drinking companions, was tasked with monitoring Spanish nationals in Cuba who were suspected of working for Franco's government and passing information to the Axis powers. The FBI, which was simultaneously trying to run its own Cuban operation, was not pleased. J. Edgar Hoover took a personal interest in Hemingway, and the bureau began keeping a file on him that would run for 124 pages and continue until 1974, thirteen years after his death. It was similar, in a way, to the bureau's treatment of other cultural figures Hoover viewed with suspicion, including Robert Hanssen, whose career at the bureau later illustrated how institutionally paranoid the FBI had become about perceived threats, internal and external alike.

By 1960, Hemingway was convinced the FBI was still watching him. He told friends that agents were following his car in Ketchum, Idaho, that his phone was tapped, that men in the street were watching him. His friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner recalled driving with Hemingway and the writer's hunting companion Forrest MacMullen in November 1960, with Hemingway insisting they were being tailed. "Was he making it up?" Hotchner later wrote. "Why would the FBI be following Ernest Hemingway?" The answer, which nobody knew at the time, was that they were. A Freedom of Information request filed by biographer Jeffrey Meyers in 1983 confirmed that the FBI had been monitoring Hemingway continuously since 1942, had tapped his phones, tracked him to the Mayo Clinic, and kept watching him right up to his suicide. The file noted, with evident satisfaction, that Hemingway's Crook Factory intelligence was "almost without fail valueless," but the surveillance continued regardless.

Cuba, Castro, and the Lost Manuscripts

Hemingway had lived at Finca Vigia for over twenty years. He'd written For Whom the Bell Tolls there, and The Old Man and the Sea, and kept thousands of pages of manuscripts, letters, and notes in filing cabinets at the house and in a bank vault in Havana. When the US embassy advised him to leave Cuba in July 1960 as relations with Castro's government deteriorated, Hemingway went. He didn't know it was permanent. The house was left exactly as it was, as though he'd gone for a walk and was coming back. He never did.

After his death, with Americans banned from travelling to Cuba and diplomatic relations severed, Mary Hemingway obtained special permission through contacts in the Kennedy administration to return to Havana and negotiate with Castro's government directly. Castro allowed her to remove the manuscripts from the bank vault and some paintings from the house, in exchange for the Finca being turned into a national museum. Mary had the manuscripts, which included the original typescript of The Old Man and the Sea and the unpublished Islands in the Stream, loaded onto a shrimp trawler, the last American vessel to leave Havana, and sailed to Florida. She later arranged for the papers to go to the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, where they remain.

The Mayo Clinic and ECT

In late 1960, Hemingway's mental and physical state had become critical enough that he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His admission was kept quiet; to avoid press attention, he was checked in under the name George Saviers, his Ketchum doctor's name. He was 61 years old, his blood pressure was severely elevated, his liver was damaged, and he was deeply depressed. The treating physicians decided to administer electroconvulsive therapy.

ECT was, by 1960, an established treatment for severe depression, but it carries significant risks to memory and cognitive function, particularly with the higher-voltage protocols used at the time. Hemingway received around 15 rounds of ECT during two separate stays at the Mayo Clinic. Each course left him more confused and less able to write. His friends reported that he struggled to complete sentences. He couldn't read back his own work.

He told Hotchner: "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient."

He was discharged in late January 1961 and returned to Ketchum. Mary found him in the kitchen one morning with a loaded shotgun. The guns in the house were quietly moved to a storage room and the keys given to the doctor. Hemingway found them within days. He was readmitted to the Mayo Clinic in April 1961 for a second course of ECT, and discharged again on 26 June 1961.

The Morning of 2 July 1961

He'd been home in Ketchum for five days. On the morning of 2 July 1961, Mary heard a sound at around 7.30am. She came downstairs and found Hemingway in the entrance hall. He was 61 years old, three weeks shy of his 62nd birthday. The official statement initially described the death as accidental. Mary later confirmed it was a suicide. He'd used one of his own shotguns, retrieved from the locked storage room. The key had been left on the kitchen windowsill.

His death became part of a devastating pattern in his family. His father Clarence had shot himself in 1928. His brother Leicester did the same in 1982. His sister Ursula in 1966. And in 1996, his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway died of a drug overdose the night before the anniversary of Ernest's death, the fifth member of the family to die by suicide. The pattern that had started with Clarence was still running three generations later.

What the ECT Destroyed

The debate about Hemingway's final years has often focused on whether the ECT was appropriate or whether it accelerated his decline. His biographers are divided. Some argue the ECT was the only option left given the severity of his depression. Others, including Hotchner, concluded that it destroyed the one thing that had kept him going. Hemingway himself was clear about what he thought. He'd spent his whole life arguing that a writer's memory was everything, that prose came from lived experience precisely recalled and precisely rendered. The treatment had taken that from him. Whether he could have recovered it, or whether the hemochromatosis and the years of heavy drinking had already made that impossible, is something that can't now be answered.

A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, edited by Mary from the manuscripts he'd left. The Garden of Eden came in 1986. Islands in the Stream in 1970. The work he couldn't finish in the last years of his life, the work he'd convinced himself had gone beyond his reach, turned out to still be there. He just couldn't see it anymore.